Day: May 31, 2010

The PhorsePOV by [Julian Skidmore] almost slipped by, but we thought it was a nice easy hack for your Memorial Monday. The gadget uses an ATTINY25 to drive 6 LEDs aren’t standard characters 7 units high? Which when waved in the air produces a readable message. What we were really interested in is the use of a single button for text entry, called Phorse code, or an “easier to learn and remember” version of Morse code. While it seemed silly at first, most of us here could enter messages within a few minutes of trying.

There’s a million tutorials out there describing how to use shift registers. If you’re just getting into embedded systems you should know how to use them as they allow you to take three microcontroller pins and expand them virtually without limits. This is due to the serial-in parallel-out nature of these integrated circuits. A key feature of these chips is the ability to overflow, or cascade to the next chip which is what provides the expansibility.

Protostack just published a tutorial that uses this hardware to interface sixteen LEDs using two shift registers. The explanation is short and to-the-point with easy to understand code examples. There’s also something to be said for their crisp and clean breadboarding work.

[Nathan] took this boombox and outfitted it for Bluetooth streaming. He took a Motorola DC800, which is meant to make headphones wireless, and connected it to the stereo inputs. The controls for the Bluetooth module were routed to the stock tape deck controls and a little bit of frosted spray paint adds a blue glow to the cassette window. Now he can stream music from his phone, including internet radio, which he’s done in the video after the break.

Turn your volume down and take a look at the brick sorting robot in the video above. It’s built using LEGO and powered by four different NXT modules. It sorts differently colored bricks on the intake conveyor and places them on three output conveyors. The build is solid and was [Chris Shepherd’s] impetus for starting a blog. We appreciate the pneumatic tricks that he detailed in some of his earlier posts such as a compressor, pressure switch, and air tank system. His advice is “build, build, build” and that’s what you’d have to do to perfect a monster of this size and scope.

[Rafael Mizrahi] built a flight simulator that lets him fly like Ironman. As you can see in the video after the break, the hardware involves an automotive crane, hang gliding harness, plus the wings and tail from a UAV. A giant fan pointed at the wearer allows him to use the wings and tail to maneuver while the Wii remote strapped to his chest tracks the movement and feeds it to Google Earth Flight Simulator which is seen through the head-mounted display. We’re used to seeing intense flight simulators but this is something completely different.